Weeknote 25/2025
Last week, I watched my son’s team come second in the end-of-season basketball playoffs. This weekend, I was in Nottingham as my daughter’s Whitley Bay team was competing in an invite-only national football tournament for league and cup winners.
It was hot — about 30°C for most of the day — and the squad was carrying a lot of injuries. We had to take a player from another Whitley Bay team along to make up the numbers, as a couple of players couldn’t make it, and another couple only managed cameo appearances. Grace, my daughter, is still recovering from an ankle injury sustained about six weeks ago, and which she aggravated three weeks ago during the school football tour in Valencia. Somehow, she still managed to play almost every minute of every game at the tournament.
I’ll not give you a blow-by-blow account, but they started pretty badly, and only got through the group stages by the skin of their teeth. The team from Bedford they played in the round of 16 thought it was going to be a walk in the park, but it really wasn’t. I’m not sure if it was pure sports psychology, but as soon as they switched from their blue tops to yellow ones for the afternoon session, they were like a different team!
While Whitley Bay should have beaten Bedford easily in regular time, it finished 1-1 and went to a penalty shootout. Grace scored the winning penalty and was pretty much taken out by her teammates as they celebrated with her!
In the next round, they played a team from Barnet called Panthera, who have a lot of ex-Arsenal Academy players. It was a close game that Whitley Bay lost 1-0. I’m not sure they could have played another couple of games, to be honest; they were absolutely exhausted and had multiple squad members playing through injuries. Panthera went on to win the tournament, so for our girls to get to the quarter finals was an immense achievement. They’re one of the best eight teams in England at their age group 👏👏👏
The rest of the week pales into insignificance, really. My son, Ben, had his last ‘A’ Level exam (Physics) and enjoyed 36 hours to himself while the three of us were down in Nottingham. He’s working as a lifeguard and enjoying doing pretty much nothing before his holiday with the lads in a couple of weeks’ time.
Work-wise, I haven’t done much on the BBC AI Literacies project as I’m waiting for feedback on our draft report. I ended up skipping the trip to Manchester last Wednesday for the BRAID event after I was advised we’d need the remaining budget for updates and tweaks. I did publish a post about some of the ‘gaps’ we found during our resarch.
The AIUK community platform project is going well, so I’ve been working on that, as well as getting things ready for the DCC Summit in The Netherlands next week. Laura and I are helping with Day 1 and facilitating Day 2.
I published a few things on Thought Shrapnel, including going through quite lengthy articles and pulling out relevant quotations:
- Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such
- GPQA is difficult enough to be useful for scalable oversight research on future models significantly more capable than the best existing public models
- Misinformation and disinformation don’t actually need to convince anyone of anything to have an impact. They just need to make you question what you’re seeing.
- About that MIT paper on LLMs for essay writing…
- Signal groups make it possible to have semi-public, but still incredibly private, spaces
- When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
I’m almost falling asleep writing this post, so the heat really must have got to me yesterday. It’s my half-birthday today, so I’m expecting cake later 😴
Next week, we’re having an air-source heat pump fitted. It was delivered on Friday, and along with the hot water tank, pipes, and new radiators, it’s taking up a good proportion of our garage! Thankfully, I’ll be away for most of the week, travelling over to the Netherlands for the DCC Summit on Tuesday, and coming back on Friday.
I’m looking forward to decommissioning our existing gas boiler, and disconnecting the gas supply from our property entirely so that we don’t have to pay the standing charge. That means we’ll be able to rip the unused fireplace out of the lounge, and reorganise that space a bit. I’d also like a home battery, preferably with solar panels, and to swap our existing petrol-powered second car for an EV. One thing at a time, though…
Photo of strawberries ripening in a planter in our garden (left by previous owners) taken by me earlier this week.